Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
Architect designed legacy for unity in city
Glasgow-born first Cape Town mayor inspired a functioning municipality
ARCHITECT and former mayor John Parker’s self- professed identity as a “municipal socialist” makes him a tantalising interview subject in a contemporary urban setting of dynamism, tension and change.
But Parker is not available; he died almost a century ago.
In significant ways, however, his agency outlasts his mortality. If history perpetually revisits the present, this much is visibly true of those who designed or crafted the streets and buildings we live or work in today.
And a striking instance is Parker’s distinctive 1902 triplestorey edifice at 76 Long Street. Residents of the first half of the 20th century would have known it as the Young Women’s Christian Association.
We recognise it today as a symbol of the inner city’s incorporation of its continental hinterland; the Pan African Market hosts more than 30 stores and stalls representing at least 14 countries in east, west and southern Africa.
Drawings and photographs of this and many other buildings by Scottish-born Parker, the son of an itinerant Clydeside carpenter, are featured in a richly illustrated book to be launched in Cape Town next week by one of his 26 grandchildren, Howard Parker, himself an architect and today a resident of the US.
The launch at the Cape Institute of Architects has a strong Parker connection; John Parker was its first president in 1902. What’s more, the author’s father, Kilgour, and brother, Graham (of GAP Architects), both noted Cape Town practitioners, followed in the old man’s footsteps as presidents of the institute, in 1937 and 1998.
The figure who emerges from his grandson’s account is a confident, capable individual with a strong sense of civic-mindedness. He arrived in the country as a 16-year-old foreigner in 1882, and died in 1921 as a highly regarded architect, the recipient of an OBE, and the first mayor of Greater Cape Town, the inau- gural round of suburban unification, of which he was an ardent campaigner, having created the forerunner of today’s metropolitan government.
Parker started out as an assistant to Cape architect Charles Freeman (among the commissions he worked on was the Standard Bank building in Adderley Street). Then, seven years later, in 1889, set up his own practice in Hout Street. His “sound judgment, firmness and charming ways” earned him trust, and, in time, many commissions.
Among the diverse landmark buildings Parker designed are the Civil Service Club on Church Square, Paarl Boys’ High School, the Great Synagogue in the Gardens, the Vredenhof Residence in Rondebosch that is now home to the Frank Joubert Art Centre, and the Imperial Hotel on Long Street – better known more recently as the home of the Purple Turtle. And, of course, across the road, the Pan African Market as it now is.
The 76 Long Street building still bears its original dedication: “In memory of Minnie & Maria Bam, Founded 1886, rebuilt 1903.” It is a tragic story: the teenage Bam sisters had travelled to Germany in 1886, but both died of enteric fever after their arrival. In the same year, their grieving father, Johannes Andries Bam, donated his Long Street house in their memory to the Young Women’s Christian Association. Parker’s sense of the city, however, was more expansive than his work on individual commissions. This perspective was clarified when the family moved from Cape Town to Mowbray, and he “became increasingly concerned about the problems of the sprawling and growing suburban municipalities”.
Woodstock, Salt River, Mowbray, Rondebosch, Wynberg and several others had their own separate municipalities and competed for resources and infrastructure such as roads, water supply, sewers, slaughter- houses, fire protection, electricity and street lighting.
“He saw that the disparate municipalities were poor compared to the City of Cape Town and that there was considerable inequality between them. He was especially concerned about future water supplies for the city and the lack of waterborne sewage systems... Cesspools threatened wells from which the population drew their water.”
With this in mind, he promoted the unification of the suburban municipalities with Cape Town, believing this would enable them to “share resources and not only plan, but build a common infrastructure”.
The bureaucratic actuality if not necessarily the vision became a reality in 1913; Parker was elected to the council and was made the first mayor of what was then called Greater Cape Town.
Howard Parker writes: “My grandfather’s concern for a unified city, and functioning water supply and waterborne sewage systems, remain relevant today. He would be shocked by the lack of these basic amenities in the vast squatter areas around Cape Town in 2015.”
Comparing Parker’s “humble upbringing in a crowded oneroom tenement in the slums of Glasgow in the 1860s”, the lack of basic amenities in the poorer municipalities around Cape Town in the 1900s, and the present-day deficiencies, “is a stark reminder that the problems of poverty and rapid urbanisation continue – no doubt aggravated by the legacy of apartheid”.
While the long-dead architect’s buildings remain subtle elements of the continuing reinvention of an urban atmosphere different from the one in which they were conceived, the “service delivery” anxieties of this self- named “municipal socialist” remain pressing.
At his death the Cape Times noted: “Less than 10 years ago the Peninsula community consisted of a number of little jarring municipalities which were in continual difficulties, lacked any kind of co- operative instinct, and were utterly unable to equip themselves with the ordinary decencies of civilised life. It was John Parker who gave the impetus to the unification movement which is recognised by the overwhelming body of public opinion as having resulted in real and lasting benefits to Cape Town.”
The longer view, of Parker’s contribution no less than of the history of settlement, suggests perhaps that, just as buildings seldom survive as timeless, unaltered conceptions, so cities that grow and change – and remain dynamic – are eternally unfinished.
● For details about the launch of John Parker 18661921, Architect and Mayor of Cape Town, contact the Cape Institute for Architecture at capetownarchitect@ gmail. com or facebook.com/thearchitect.ct